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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting this essay to mention novelty. What we appreciate in art really comes down to novelty and therefore good taste is the ability to recognize it. Which in turn requires the observer to have a solid background in the genre (i.e. having seen a lot of it already) to judge how novel and original a work of art is. That's why art critics, collectors generally agree on things more often than not: they've dealt with enough of previous samples to identify novelty.

The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.

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I think this is in the right direction but critical that it’s not interpreted as more novel = more better. There’s some sweet spot of novelty, which I actually would say is closer to surprise. In order to surprise someone, you must first build expectation (e.g. use elements other artists have used), then violate it.

Exactly, and I think the 21st century artists have pretty much figured it out already and it's why new art created these days removes the aesthetics and focuses on the surprize alone (Damien Hurst, Jeff Koons, etc.)

But in the last quarter of the twentieth century M. Peretz Bernstein posited successfully that the element of surprise had been exhausted in his seminal dissertation "Nothing's Shocking" - paraphrasing another Jewish scholar of some dozens of centuries before, a M. Solomon Davidson who poetically stated "There is nothing new under the sun".

That's a really interesting attribute to focus on. Never thought of novelty as a standard.

I think there's an argument to be made for culturally convergent "taste" as a measure of value. We like what others like, we're all trying to predict what others will like to increase our own status, etc. These forces should result in a convergent "good taste" to win.

By that definition the worst movies should be more novel. There are definitely movies that exist in which the reaction of everyone is that how can anyone produce movie this bad. If you think there is no such thing as universally bad, search for worst song in youtube.

Also theoretically a random static is the most novel thing that could be present.

Can you bring some examples of films that are considered bad, rated say below IMDB 5, but are novel in some way? I don't know of any. There are some edge cases "so bad it's good" like The Room, but I personally don't get the appeal of it. And then it's an edge case anyway.

IMBD might not be a great source because that is graded by regular people, not critics. A better measure might be differences in Metacritic scores between critics and users.

That said, Zoolander has a 6.5 rating on IMDB and is considered a classic. Perhaps comedy as a genre is more likely to have that anomaly.

I find this odd assumption. Of course it is possible to have novel ideas and still have horrible dialog and shots. And no, I am not in habit of watching IMDB under 5.

Like, the reason people dont know imdb under 5 that satisfy your condition is that people avoid watching movies with low score. They dont recommend them to others either.

random static is the most novel thing that could be present.

Unstructured noise music was novel for while, but by now that has also been done.

Not true. I'm still listening to Merzbow.

It’s all about perspective.

Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired Star Wars, like Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” or Midway boring or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white. In a mass market product those technical factors make the work less approachable.

I spent several years walking through a pretty good collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no impression on me at all, but one installation’s aesthetic appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe. Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that space — they literally dropped a random howitzer in the room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their art, I’d develop a more nuanced understanding and appreciation.

Personally I think novelty is specifically a subcomponent of how creativity is judged with an implicit "judged as good or significant" caveat. Novel styles or techniques which are fertile seems to be a sign of this. Fertile as in it may be applied to many other works, especially if the derivatives are varied and creative. Even genres or works not held in high esteem are considered superior to imitators. Although there is some "if treason doth prosper none dare call it treason" to it.

A well executed refinement of the throughly worn tends to get panned as derivative while foundational works have other sins and lack of polish forgiven. For an extreme example take the infamous Leni Riefenstahl - Adolf Hitler's propagandist. She is studied for her role in pioneering cinematic techniques, if her works weren't novel they would be more a matter of study for historians than cinematographers.

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